Recently, due to the need for reducing the weight of automobiles and improving collision safety, high strength steel sheet excellent in formability into chassis frame members and reinforcement members, seat frame parts, and the like are being strongly demanded. From the aesthetic design and chassis design requirements, complicated shapes are sometimes demanded. High strength steel sheet having superior working performance is therefore necessary.
On the other hand, due to the increasingly higher strength of steel sheet, the working method is frequently shifting from the conventional drawing using wrinkle elimination to simple stamping and bending. Especially, when the bending ridge is an arc or other curve, stretch flanging where the end face of the steel sheet is elongated is sometimes used. Further, there are also quite a few parts which are worked by burring to expand a worked hole (preparatory hole) to form a flange. The amount of the expansion in the large case is up to 1.6 times the diameter of the preparatory hole.
On the other hand, the phenomenon of springback or other elastic recovery after working a part occurs more readily the higher the strength of the steel sheet and obstructs securing the precision of the part.
In this way, these working methods require stretch flangeability, hole expandability, bendability, and other local formability of the steel sheet, but conventional high strength steel sheet do not have sufficient performance, cracks and other defects occur, and stable working of the products is not possible.
Therefore, up to now, high strength steel sheet improved in stretch flangeability has been proposed in Japanese Patent Publication (A) No. 9-67645, but there has been a remarkable increase in the need for improvement in workability, in particular hole expandability and therefore further improvement enabling simultaneous improvement in elongation as well.